Jason: A Dystopian Paranormal Urban Fantasy Romance (Warrior World Book 3)

by Rebecca Royce

  She smiled at me. “You’re hard on yourself. I know because I’m the same way. Maybe neither one of us is as dark as we think we are. Maybe our source material made it so both of us had to start the race a lap behind everyone else.”

  “Maybe you shouldn’t have to run a race defined by rules everyone else wrote, Margot.” This woman had risked her life to come ask me for help and shouldn’t be feeling like that.

  She raised her eyebrows. “Maybe you shouldn’t either, Jason.”

  Now, that was an interesting thought.

  She was the most interesting person I’d ever spoken to and seemed to be equally as invested in anything I said as though my utterances contained some sort of clue to the universe. I wondered if she was like this with everyone or just with me.

  “So you don’t actually feel any pain during your shift?” Margot practically bounced as she walked. She’d never gotten to ask a Werewolf shifting questions before.

  I shook my head. “Not anymore. When it first happens it’s startling painful. I used to wish it would just go away. My sisters were much better Wolves than I was. They loved it from day one. I just wanted to be human.”

  “That must have really been something, living back then, in secret. No one knowing Werewolves were real except, you know, Werewolves. Having to hide.”

  “It was my reality so I didn’t have much to compare it to. Actually, I hated it.”

  We arrived at Genesis and I steeled my spine. “Well, we’re here.”

  I was reluctant to let her go, so much so that I hadn’t let go of her hand yet. That had to be borderline weird. Of course, she hadn’t released mine either so I supposed it could go both ways. Only I didn’t find it off at all. It was nice to have someone’s hand to hold for a change. I’d really been quasi preoccupied with this for hours. I forced myself to let go of her and she briefly released the scent of anxiety.

  Was she upset I had done that? It quickly passed and wasn’t worth asking. Fast emotions came and went. It was the lingering ones that needed to be addressed in my experience. Or not. Sometimes it was better just to leave things alone.

  “We’re here.” She turned to look at the tower marking the edge of Genesis. I’d noticed it last time I was here but been too aggravated to really dwell on its existence. They’d built this in the time I’d been dead.

  I pointed to the building. “How long have they had that?”

  “Less than a year. Micah and his wife Brynna are in charge of it. She used to be a Vampire.”

  My breath caught in my throat. “Used to be?”

  “That’s right. I cured her. Not sure why I just told you that except I have this strange need for you to be impressed by me. Maybe it’s a friend thing. Kind of counter intuitive. I don’t know.”

  I smiled at her even as my ears began to ring. “That’s fantastic that you did that. But I’m confused. How did you cure her?”

  “It’s a virus. I cured it—in her. Not everyone can be cured. But she could, and it worked. She’s unusual. Didn’t go back one hundred percent to the way it was before but she’s not a Vampire per se anymore.”

  I bent over, holding onto my knees. “So you can’t just fix the Vampires?”

  “Jason, are you okay?”

  I really wasn’t. “My mother was made a Vampire.”

  She sighed, coming over to put her hand on my back. “If it were as simple as just being able to cure everyone I swear I would do it. We’ve lost everyone else we tried to help. They died badly. We have to be careful who we make the attempt on. The scientists I worked with when I cured Brynna didn’t care who was tortured in the process. Then they wanted to kill Brynna to dissect her and find out why it worked.”

  I got it. There were few ethics and little morality left in the world. She didn’t want to do that to people unnecessarily. I stood, resuming my typical position of not really letting myself feel anything strongly to begin with. I’d just be thrown. My mother was a sore subject for me. We’d let her down. When I let myself think about it, her being out there somewhere in the world undead was like a big gaping wound to my soul.

  Man, I could be dramatic when I wanted to be.

  “It’s fine.” I waved my hand in the air. “Good job being so brilliant. I don’t suppose you could cure Werewolf-ism could you?”

  She scrunched up her eyebrows. “Vampirism is caused by a virus. Werewolf is a gene. I don’t know why anyone would want to cure that. It’s not an illness. It would be like asking to cure green eyes. There’s nothing wrong to begin with.”

  I shook my head. “Obviously, I’m kidding.”

  “Oh. Sometimes I miss humor.”

  She hadn’t missed a joke. I really hadn’t been making one, even if I pretended now. How did I explain that what she called natural, I labeled a curse? I didn’t want it, and I couldn’t think of a single thing in my life that being this half human, half Werewolf thing I was didn’t in some way fuck up. Maybe if I’d never had a mother who was pure human, maybe if I had spent more time surrounded with just my own kind and not nearly all of it with people who didn’t have to worry about accidently shifting into something else, I could have enjoyed it. But that wasn’t my life.

  Never had been. And the pack I was trying to keep alive right now wasn’t altering my feelings on the subject. Was it possible to hate one whole side of yourself? Yes, it was.

  Micah Lyons stepped out of the bottom of the tower we’d been discussing and rushed over to us. “Margot, you’re okay?”

  She scratched her head. “Sure.”

  “We’ve been incredibly worried about you. You vanished.”

  That didn’t make sense. “I thought they sent you to make a deal with me.”

  She looked between us. “I don’t understand. They did.”

  “Oh,” Micah lifted his eyebrows. “Well, no one meant for you to go running out there alone. That was a mix up. You’re our only doctor. If for no other reason than that, we kind of need you to tell us where you’re going, if we forget how dangerous it is out there.”

  Micah wasn’t wrong but that didn’t temper my reaction to hearing him order her around like he had the right to. “She’s a grownup. Is there a rule in Genesis now that adults can’t do as they like?”

  The dark haired Warrior didn’t move. “Are you arguing with me just for the sake of it or do you want an answer, Wolf?”

  I opened and closed my mouth. Margot left me wrecked with the curing Vampire news and I did want to fight something. It was the Wolf inside of me. He was always ready to throw down and prove himself. I’d done that enough with Micah and he had a machete. If I lost he could lop off my head and then none of us would be any better for it.

  “I’m not arguing with you at all. That would imply I gave a shit what you thought.” I backed off them. I’d gotten Margot home. She was with her people. “I told her I would do it but I have some conditions. Find a way to tell me if you’re willing to meet them. I’m available to use my Vampire taking down services any day. Until then.” I nodded at Margot. “It was a real treat getting to chat with you today.” I met Micah’s gaze, which was, as usual, steely and accusatory. “Micah.”

  I walked away from them, waiting until I was out of sight to shift. I didn’t need some overzealous Warrior catching me by surprise and taking off my head. Not that any of them had managed that so far. It was everything I could do not to turn around and sprint back to Genesis. I didn’t even know why, but I kept stopping and almost turning around. My heart beat fast and that was unusual for my Wolf body. What in the ever loving fuck was going on?

  My head was too conscious, too human to be in my fur body. Why wasn’t the Wolf driving this bus? I huffed out my frustration. No matter. I’d run until I couldn’t think at all.

  The woods were old friends. I knew them too well. This was my life, the one scientists who had nothing better to do with their time had doomed us all to live. They’d made Vampires by screwing up a virus.

  I’d gone from having one life to
an entirely different one. I couldn’t even remember the years in between. I guessed I’d been lost to the Werewolf version of it. I’d woken up, like coming out of a long, terrible dream.

  Now I had to live this. Alone.

  I skidded to a stop. But I wasn’t the only one that way, was I? I turned to look back at where Genesis would be if I could see it in the distance, which I couldn’t anymore. Margot was singular in her world, too.

  She was cloned—but then again so were a lot of us, including Chad Lyons—but her clone was the woman who had done this to all of us. The chief scientist, the driving force behind all this pain. Margot had to live like she was constantly under suspicion.

  I knew that feeling well.

  I charged toward Genesis as fast as my four legs could take me, skidding to a stop when I finally got in front of it. What was I doing here? They weren’t going to just let me in to see her. I had to get past Micah’s gate and dressed in my fur that was not happening. I called the shift, panting as I came back into my human form. I stared up at the tower.

  “Micah,” I bellowed up at it. When no one answered I tried again.

  Finally, a figure appeared, stepping out from the watchtower to the balcony attached. It wasn’t Micah, but his wife. She was dark haired, looking like she didn’t belong in daylight at all. If ever there was a person made for the night it was that woman. I blinked. What was the matter with me? I’d never been any kind of a poet. I wasn’t going to start thinking ridiculous things now.

  “Jason,” she called down to me. “Micah isn’t here. He’s patrolling right now. The border.”

  I sighed. I wasn’t getting in if Micah didn’t let me, and I was probably not then either.

  I had to let this go. They’d come find me when they needed me and whatever this weird obsession I had going on now I had to get over it. I wasn’t going to repeat history and let my head go too Wolf until I lost perspective. I’d leave.

  “Thanks.” I waved a hand at her. “You could have cut off my head from up there. Thanks for not doing that.”

  She shook her head. “I knew who you were. You know, your mother loved you so much. I… I can see it.”

  Her words sucked the air right out of my lungs. When I could, I answered her. “What?”

  “Mothers shouldn’t have favorites and she loved your sisters, too. But she understood you completely. You were just like her. You always thought it was your dad, but it wasn’t. It was…”

  “Brynna,” Micah’s voice cut through the air like an arrow. “Don’t do that. Jason may not want to hear those things.”

  He was right. I’d let these wounds fester too long, and every time I touched them they were like a fresh hell.

  Four

  I followed Micah into the heart of Genesis, refusing to meet anyone’s gaze. First off, there was the Wolf problem. Mine didn’t like when people I considered adversarial made eye contact with me. It was a challenge. I could temper that with my human side. But I still didn’t like it, particularly when I had any kind of anxiety going on. Second, I’d known a lot of them when things went to hell with Rachel. I didn’t need to stare at their anger, anxiety, discomfort, and whatever else they were fucking feeling when I could smell it just fine.

  Swimming through the emotions of large crowds à la my nose sucked big time. It always did. I’d avoided anywhere I could that had more than fifty people in it. That hadn’t always been an option when I’d been pretending to be a human.

  Since I’d insisted on coming inside because I wanted to see Margot, I was going to keep my mouth shut about any discomfort I had.

  Micah walked next to me. “Changed since last you were here quite a bit, right?”

  They’d still been trying to figure out how to make it work after coming up from the underground habitat Icahn had them all living in for years. Now, it looked more like a small tent city with some actual houses being built around the perimeter. That’s what we needed to learn to do, if they agreed on it. The structures would last forever and spoke of permanence. It meant that we really believed it was possible to live out lives here that could last generations.

  Not that my pack had a lot of that going on. The women were all too old now to breed. But sometimes I heard rumbles of looking for other Werewolves, of traveling to find them and bringing them in. We couldn’t do that if we had nowhere for them to go.

  Genesis had clearly made the same sort of decisions. If the crowds in the center of town were any indication, they’d doubled in size. This was wonderful and dangerous. On one hand, it spoke of security. Large groups of people could defend together. On the other, they were also easily wiped out. With the Werewolf virus gone, I could at least rest assured I wouldn’t be doing the wiping out.

  Which was not to say they wouldn’t do that to me.

  “How do the Warriors defend such a large number?” Micah was the right person to ask that question to since he certainly seemed to be in charge with his tower on the edge of the town.

  He nodded. “When we discovered it was just Icahn’s manipulation that made Warriors to begin with, not some freak gene we were born with, we have come to believe that we can train more than we were doing before. Everyone gets the chance to try out to be a Warrior if they want to. About a quarter of the young population makes the attempt at thirteen and a quarter of that makes it. Still small numbers but more than we had.”

  “That’s great.”

  We rounded the corner and stopped in a large gathering area. Margot stood in front of Chad, Tiffani, and Deacon. They were listening to her intently although all their gazes quickly shot to me when Micah and I arrived. A smile crossed Margot’s face, and despite the mounting tension of the moment, I returned it. She was who I’d come to see for no other reason than to tell her she wasn’t alone. Internally, I sighed. Maybe that was the dumbest thing ever. In fact, standing there, I couldn’t remember a poorer thought out moment in my entire existence, and I’d once, under the furor of the virus, challenged Rachel to a duel in a Vampire pit.

  “He’s here.” Margot swung around to the group again. “So you can tell him yourself.”

  Tiffani rose and crossed to me. I had no idea what reception to expect from her. We hadn’t had that much to do with each other. She was married to someone named Keith who trained the Warriors. If they were talking about me, I was surprised to not see him in on the decisions. But maybe he’d stepped down?

  She wrapped her arms around me in a hug. “I’m glad to see you. I know this is an unpopular opinion around here, but I always loved your family, Jason. My son wouldn’t be here if your father hadn’t saved me during his delivery. You were always kind when you weren’t sick. Another cloning. Everyone gets cloned back to life but Keith, it feels like. They tell me I shouldn’t wish for it, that sometimes the results are awful. I’m glad to see you’re fine.”

  I gave her the slightest squeeze back. As a rule, I wasn’t a hugger. She was being kind, and I’d been raised better than to be rude. Her words banged around in my head. That at least explained where Keith was. Dead…

  That must have been a truly devastating loss for this group. They’d all loved him like family. “I’m very sorry to hear that, Tiffani.”

  She nodded and stepped back. “It’s a yes for me. Whatever Jason needs to help stabilize things around here, I’m for. Even without trading anything. If he wants to help us, more the better.”

  Deacon didn’t move. He looked down at the ground. “I think if Jason can help us with this serious problem I’m all for it. We need to do something about the daywalkers. They scare the crap out of me, and I don’t get afraid. I lived with Vamps for most of my life underground and I have no idea what these new ones are or what to expect of them. Also, if he builds houses, it is my hope that we can keep a stable group of Werewolves nearby that won’t want to attack us. We can all work on the Vamp population together.”

  Like Genesis itself, what I proposed doing would make us at risk if Deacon or someone else changed their minds. We�
��d be easily hunted down. Although killing Werewolves wasn’t so easy; and we would equally be able to monitor them as well. We could play nicely but be ready for each other if it came to that.

  My father would never have wanted this. But he was dead and no one cloned him to come back. They chose me. There had to be a reason for that.

  Oh, who was I kidding? There was never a reason for anything.

  Did the decision have to be unanimous? Chad and I had no love lost between us. Then again, he’d sent Margot to go get me. Maybe he’d become pragmatic somewhere along the line. He leaned forward

  “Sure, sounds good.”

  I blinked. That was it? They were going to teach my pack how to build houses and all I had to do was get them a daywalking Vampire. In a million years, I’d never have thought it was going to be that easy.

  “Great.” I nodded. “Margot, can I see you for a second?”

  She brightened up. “Sure. Give me a moment and I’ll…”

  A bell sounded, blaring so loudly I had to cover my ears. Margot winced. “Sorry, Jason. That’s for me. There’s a medical emergency of some kind. Can you wait?”

  She didn’t pause to answer me but ran out of the room, presumably heading for wherever she would go help whoever was in trouble. I watched her disappear. In the midst of all of this, I’d not given any thought to the fact that Margot was an actual doctor. She wasn’t just smart, beautiful, and lonely—she was a trained professional with an amazing skillset to save lives. Why on earth did I think she needed anything from me at all?

  Chad pointed left. “One block that way, big red tent. That’s where you’ll find her. That’s where I would go if I were you.”

  I nodded. Why had he done that? I didn’t pause to question it any further, running instead after Margot. She’d asked if I could wait, and I didn’t know if I could or not because I didn’t know how long she needed to do whatever it was she was going to be doing. Sure, that seemed like a great reason to be running and not at all because I hated that she was out of my sight.